Archives for May 2011

Everybody’s having his or her say about Arthur Laurents, who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story and who died the other day at the age of ninety-three. Much of what’s being said about him is a bit on the sanctimonious side, which is mildly amusing. The truth is that Laurents was one of the most detested people in the theater business, a genuinely nasty man about whom more than a few of his famous ex-friends had nothing good to say, just as he had nothing good to say about them. I suspect that his nastiness was rooted in the fact that he never succeeded in writing anything of lasting interest other than Gypsy and West Side Story, and resented his better-known collaborators for having made possible his own success, such as it was.
For my part, I wrote nothing about Laurents’ death because I’d already said my piece about him in a Wall Street Journal review of Original Story By, his 2000 autobiography. Laurents spewed venom all over a long list of people, Jerome Robbins in particular, in Original Story By, which explains the last paragraph of my review:

Jerome Robbins was one of the twentieth century’s greatest choreographers, while Arthur Laurents will in the not-so-long run be remembered solely for having collaborated with his artistic betters, Robbins very much included. Small wonder, then, that Original Story By leaves a rancid taste in the mouth. For all its irresistible readability, too much of it stinks of smugness and spite–and envy.

So it did, and does.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the last two openings of the current New York season, Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. The first is good, the second long. Here’s an excerpt.
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Fame caught up with Lynn Nottage when she won a Pulitzer for “Ruined,” but by then she was already known in the world of theater as a writer of real quality. One of her most noteworthy talents is the ability to write “political” plays in which the focus is not on abstract ideas but on ordinary people whose lives have been shaped–or twisted–by those ideas. “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” a portrait of a black film actress of the ’30s, is a choice example of her method. In the hands of a less accomplished artist, it could easily have become a droning study of Discrimination in Action. Instead, Ms. Nottage has given us a sharp-toothed comedy that makes its points through indirection rather than with self-righteous indignation. As ingeniously constructed as it is amusing, “Vera Stark” is a worthy successor to “Ruined,” and though Second Stage’s production doesn’t do justice to the play’s multi-layered subtleties, you should see it anyway.
In the first act, set in 1933, we meet the title character, a spunky young black woman (Sanaa Lathan) who works as a maid for a white film star (Stephanie J. Block) but longs to break into the movies herself. When Gloria, Vera’s employer, gets a shot at the lead role in a high-calorie weeper called “The Belle of New Orleans” that also has a small but choice part for a slave, Vera contrives through elaborately silly means to audition for the part. Then we flash forward to 2003 and learn that she not only got it but became one of the most successful black actresses in Hollywood–though she was never allowed to play anything other than slaves and maids. The second act is set at an academic colloquium called “Rediscovering Vera Stark” in which three pseudo-hip film-studies professors (Daniel Breaker, Kimberly Hébert Gregory and Karen Olivo) wrangle over the meaning of Vera’s career and show a clip of a 1973 talk-show appearance in which she and Gloria are reunited for the first time in years.
This too-tight précis only hints at the barbed irony with which Ms. Nottage sketches the proliferating complexities of Vera’s life. Desperate to become a star, she learns that Hollywood stardom is a better-paid form of enslavement in which stereotypes are the shackles….
If you think that Tony Kushner is a genius, then you’re likely to be surprised and disappointed by “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures,” which is a garrulous, rambling mess. If, on the other hand, you think that Mr. Kushner is a flawed artist who’s never learned how to make fully effective use of his gifts, then you’re more likely to see “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide” as all of a piece with his earlier plays. Like “Angels in America” and “Homebody/Kabul” before it, “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide” is too long–three hours and 40 minutes, to be exact–and too diffuse to be easily endured by anyone lacking the patience of a secular saint….
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Read the whole thing here.

Evelyn Waugh talks to Elizabeth Jane Howard about the modern novel on Monitor, originally telecast by the BBC in 1964:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

If you’re curious, the complete text of the commencement address I delivered last Saturday at Rollins College is here.

“I have lately been reading both Joyce and Proust with considerable disappointment; they both seem to me very sick men, giant invalids who, in spite of enormous talent, were crippled by the same disease, elephantiasis of the ego. They both attempted titanic tasks, and both failed for lack of that dull but healthy quality without which no masterpiece can be contrived, a sense of proportion.”
Cyril Connolly, “Comment” (Horizon, May 1941)

I’m just about to wrap up my New York-based duties for the 2010-11 season. I finally caught up with Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures on Sunday afternoon, and last night I saw Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. I have three Wall Street Journal columns to write this week. On Thursday I’m seeing New York City Ballet dance The Seven Deadly Sins, Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s new Brecht-Weill ballet. On Friday Mrs. T and I go to Carnegie Hall to see Dawn Upshaw and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra give the New York premiere of Maria Schneider’s Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories, conducted by the composer. We’ll see an exhibition of Jane Freilicher’s new paintings and prints on Saturday, and on Sunday we’re going to try to catch Win Win.
Come Monday morning we’ll jump on a plane, fly to San Diego, and start our summer travels. Our first two weeks on the road are going to be fairly hectic: we’re seeing Alan Ayckbourn’s new play in San Diego, The Front Page, Porgy and Bess, and Heartbreak House in Chicago, and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Then we return to New York via Amtrak and take a few days off, the first real stretch of downtime that I’ve had in longer than I can easily recall.
I almost never plan to be as busy as I end up getting. I knew, for instance, that Danse Russe would be premiered at the tail end of the Broadway season, but it never occurred to me that the first half of the season would be so disastrous that the second half would be unnaturally hectic. Virtually all the shows that I reviewed in the fall had closed by the end of January and had to be replaced by new ones, not a few of which were rushed into Broadway theaters in order to qualify for this year’s Tony Awards. Hence I saw five shows during one week in April, two of them (both musicals and bouh lousy) in one day. Had I known how crazy things would be in April, I would have made a point of taking two weeks off in May.
I didn’t, though, so I mean to approach the next two weeks with the best possible attitude. It helps–a lot–that I expect to enjoy all five of the shows that Mrs. T and I will be seeing. It helps, too, that we’re visiting three cities that we both find highly agreeable, and since I have to set aside enough time along the way to write and file reviews for the Journal, we’ll be sitting down in each city long enough to relax a bit, see a few sights, eat some good meals, and visit with an assortment of old friends, including our beloved Our Girl in Chicago.
As usual, you’ll be hearing from me along the way, so watch this space to keep up with the unfolding saga of the Traveling Teachouts.

The New York Drama Critics’ Circle voted on its annual awards yesterday, and announced the results immediately after the meeting. To find out who won what and how we all voted, go here.
Two items for the record:
• I didn’t vote for any of the winners.
• Our bylaws specify that after the first ballot, each member must vote for three shows in each category, regardless of whether that member believes there to be three shows worthy of a prize. Therein lies a dilemma: if you don’t vote for three different shows, your vote(s) for the show(s) you did support won’t be counted. Hence I “voted” for second- and third-place shows in the Best Foreign Play and Best Musical categories that I did not in fact support.
If you should go to the NYDCC website and look at the balloting, please don’t draw any mistaken conclusions from my “votes” on the later ballots.

“He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr. Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters–Dickens and Balzac even–were flagrantly guilty.”
Evelyn Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold